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Building a Healthy Codebase: Minimum Requirements

I’ve been lucky enough to see a small codebase grow and become a gigantic system able to handle millions of transactions a day while being profitable. Obviously not everything was fine and dandy when we started building this beast; a lot of good (and bad) practices where chosen for different reasons.

Starting with this post, I will be sharing with you the best practices to follow (and the worse practices to avoid) when building complex Computer Systems, all of this based on my more than 12 years of professional experience, which includes Real Time, Automation, Accessibility and Web Services.

We’ll start small today and eventually we will get big.

Minimum Requirements

What is “Minimum Requirements”?

When a new project is planned things like Concurrent Users, Scalability and Security are topics of discussion, usually considered must have, otherwise the “System will not work”.

Those minimum requirements are what in the end usually dictates the Minimum Viable Product, if you’re lucky enough.

Before starting to work on this new project, as a Computer System Engineer, you must have yourMinimum Requirements; requirements needed for you to do your job the best possible way: a collection of best practices that must be in place before you even start writing a single line of code.

This applies to any programming language, framework, cloud solution, selected database and whatever else you need for building this system. All projects, specially greenfield projects, must honor and follow those best practices.

That is what I like to call Minimum Requirements.

The (not really) definitive list

Version Control System

This may sound like a silly thing for experienced Computer System Engineers, but it is not. What is silly is to build software without having a way to see how the software has evolved over time. This is a must, and not only that but also using a distributed one, like Git or Mercurial.

I will go beyond this requirement and require a Git Repository Manager as well, like the popular Gitlab and Github, where you can not only store your source code, but have a way to discuss new changes before incorporating them into the final version, via Merge Requests or Pull Requests.

If you decide to use Git, you may be interested in the best practices my team uses as well:

Code Style Guides

Extremely important because it makes all the code, no matter who wrote it, look and feel the same; and not only that, it also allows Engineers on your team to freely work on everything and anything. There is no mental strain to adapt your coding style to the original code when making changes because that already-written code is also following the same rules.

There are hundreds of styling guides available for almost all programming language, however the ideal scenario will not only be to follow those guidelines but to find a program that enforces those guidelines automatically as well; think of go fmt for Go or rubocop for Ruby.

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment Servers

There is already a lot of content regarding CI/CD and their benefits available online, so I won’t cover any of that. What is important to understand about CI/CD is the fact that having a way to quickly know how (un)healthy your codebase is a must.

Incorporating a Continuous Integration Server will allow you to know the status of your code (through Automatic Tests) and how well the code is tested (through Code Coverage), not to mention other important things like allowing you to automatically run linting and code smells detection programs.

Incorporating a Continuous Deployment Server will allow you to release your new features, and fixes, as quickly as you can to your users only after the CI Server validates everything looks OK. If you’re a bit afraid about this, you may consider incorporating the Docker Workflow instead and have you QA Team review the changes before being deployed.